At Carbone, they don’t ask if you’ve dined with them before. Even if you haven’t, the answer would still be yes. This is supposed to be the Italian restaurant where you celebrated your birthday before anyone told you that chicken scarpariello isn’t Italian.

This being 2013, and the two chefs, Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone, being former lieutenants of Mario Batali and Daniel Boulud, Carbone is infinitely more self-conscious than those old restaurants. It is a fancy red-sauce joint in Greenwich Village as directed by Quentin Tarantino, bringing back the punch-in-the-guts thrills of a genre that everybody else sees as uncultured and a little embarrassing, while exposing the sophistication that was always lurking there. Carbone has a technical prowess that can make you giddy; a lust for excess that can, at times, make you a little queasy; and an instinct for sheer entertainment that makes a lot of other restaurants seem like earnest, unimaginative drones.

There are, in the Tarantino style, fanboy film allusions: the tile floor from “The Godfather,” the narrow passageway into the back dining room that makes you feel like Ray Liotta handshake-tipping his way into the Copacabana.

There are the songs that make you think, “Oh, no,” followed by “I forgot how great this is,” as people with open bottles of Gaja on the table drum their fingers to “We Open in Venice.”

Like Tarantino’s love letters to pulpy exploitation films, Carbone affectionately picks up the clichés of its genre, twirls them, then hurls them at your head. Our captain wears a B-movie smile and a tuxedo in a shade of maroon last seen at Liberace’s estate sale. Bearing a hollowed-out wheel of Parmesan, he stabs a nugget of cheese and slides it on to my plate. It tastes young, milky and uninteresting, but next come papery slices of smoky and complex aged country ham, Kentucky serving as a stunt double for Parma, and a stack of “grandma bread,” a no-cheese Sicilian pizza with oregano and a shadowy, sweet pulp of tomato sauce. Both make me smile.

More unbidden genre tropes are on the way: tart giardiniera in oil, amazing garlic bread, fried ribbons of dough under powdered sugar, suave fig grappa, and delicate house-made limoncello in a bottle furry with frost. I don’t love every one of these extras, but I love the way they make me abandon any hope of quiet moderation.

Nearly the entire menu at Carbone is a quotation, starting with the $50 veal parm, which is larger than some fancy brick-oven pizzas and looks like one, too, with ovals of browned buffalo mozzarella and a bright red, summer-fresh, barely cooked tomato sauce. Served with a fried shaft of bone, it’s a shock-and-awe dish, and the most shocking thing about it is that there is no real revisionism here; it is a veal parm, the way you always hoped it would be.

More often, the old tropes get an injection of technique that acts like a syringe of epinephrine plunged into the heart. The two-and-a-half pound lobster fra diavolo is both brash and polished, the huge portion galvanized by Calabrian chiles and soothed by Cognac. No shrimp scampi has been handled as gently or luxuriously as Carbone’s chorus line of langoustines, claws extended, bodies split and slick with butter that implies garlic without coming right out and saying it.

Concentrated shellfish stock is the foundation a zuppa di pesce so deeply fragrant, you know it’s coming before it’s on the table.

I wish the clam broth that infuses linguine vongole had the same intensity. But other plates of what Carbone calls “macaroni” are remarkable. Knuckles of tortellini stuffed with whipped sheep’s milk ricotta are a show of zero-gravity delicacy while elbows of rigatoni are forceful and substantial, their tomato sauce unabashedly spicy and slyly buttery.

There are also, in this movie, some lapses in taste and judgment. Fried broccoli rabe is locked inside some of the heaviest, greasiest batter I’ve ever tasted. Carbone’s tiramisù, a wedge of layer cake with mascarpone between Marsala-soaked spongecake, is too wet and too boozy, a case where the middlebrow original is better than the highbrow makeover.

Strangest of all is something called Chinese chicken, which tastes as if Mr. Torrisi and Mr. Carbone were trying to recreate something from Chinatown Night at their college cafeterias. But old Italian-American restaurants generally have at least one dish on the menu that nobody orders. Maybe this soy-and-sesame-seed nonentity is supposed to be another in-joke, although it would be funnier if, when you ordered it, your captain said, “We just sold out.”

They could get a laugh out of it, too. Carbone’s captains are character actors who have mastered the jokey, swaggering, slightly bossy style that was a New York specialty before waiters began to have the blandly pleasant manners of the young people who carry Bibles and ring doorbells on Saturday mornings. There is a flash of three-card monte below the surface, as these men sell you on meatballs with your pasta or promise that the lemon cheesecake is “the best you’ll ever have in your life.” They aren’t lying about the cheesecake, though.

And the most talented among them can improvise dialogue while grating creamy ricotta salata over a Caesar salad that is just as sharp with anchovies as you could wish. One night a star of romantic comedies was sharing one appetizer and one main course with her male date. When the date left the table, the captain leaned in.

Captain: Nice catch.

Star: Excuse me?

Captain: I said that’s a good-looking young man you’re with.

Star: (Raucous laughter.)

This kind of thing is funny only if you agree to play along. And I’m not ready to play along with all of Carbone’s casting decisions: currently all the captains, typically the most highly tipped employees, are men.

But I admire nearly all the other choices that Mr. Torrisi, Mr. Carbone and their business partner, Jeff Zalaznick, have made. Many American restaurants are trying to reinvent fine dining by looking abroad. Carbone is mining the best elements of homegrown American style of service and cuisine that flourished when men in ties and women in heels, woozy from a final shot of sambuca, wobbled to the sidewalk clutching doggy bags.

We didn’t know how good we had it. Carbone is here to remind us.

Carbone

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